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“I’m not sure, and neither is the marshal, though I have a suspect.”
    “Who?”
    “I can’t say.”
    “You need to say, Pops.”
    “No,” Tom said.
    “We need to figure this out.”
    He could see the boy beginning to cry, tears sliding down his face. “I need to figure it out. But this is not your concern.” He reached down and hugged the boy, held him against his chest for a few seconds.
    It started to drizzle. Drops of rain fell across their shirts. “Let’s go inside before we get wet. And I’ll go put Jubal back on his chain,” Tom said to the boy.
     
    Tom had sold a few more hogs that he’d caught by baiting them with corn at Junior Cooper’s catch pen deep in the piney woods. The homemade trapdoor gate worked like a dream, but he realized the process of catching the mavericks was going to get harder and slower over time. He needed the money to recoup some of his livestock investment, not to mention the hospital bills coming home like a second assault. The deadline for removing the hogs from the rangeland was December 31st, and it was always on his mind, a foreboding date haunting him.
    Before the attack, he’d planned to buy more tools for his carpentry work, a planer and a wood lathe, a big band saw and a drill press. Perhaps he’d start doing odd jobs and fix-it projects for cash money when he wasn’t at the brickyard, now that the livestock business was becoming dead to the past. However, the estimated two-thousand-dollar hospital bill he now faced would flag any attempt at investing in an at-home shop. The surgery left pins in Sara’s shoulder and arm, and the time in the hospital cost money that he didn’t have readily available. The Hardins didn’t have insurance, and their savings account at the bank wasn’t enough to cover the bills. Tom needed to sell the remaining hogs. So far, he’d only earned four hundred dollars from the hogs and cattle he’d sold, but a number of hogs were still running wild in the woods.
     
    The day Sara returned home, she was a shell of her former self. Her face was still swollen and drawn to the right side, and several of her teeth were missing. Her left eye was bloodshot and her vision blurry. The pain was unceasing. Her broken shoulder was in a brace, and she could hardly walk because of poor balance, but at least she was home, back to the house where she’d lived since shortly after their marriage. Yet this was little comfort since it was also the place where she had been left for dead. Often, she just sat on the couch and wept, drying her tears with her dress. The new television screen showed the gray images of the Baton Rouge station, WBRZ, but she didn’t really watch it. Sara never even acknowledged the television set. When she heard footsteps nearing the room, she would cower, trying to hide. Then she’d go stiff as a corpse until she understood who was approaching.
    Perhaps the worst of it was the cold shame of the attack, the rape itself. How could the family speak of rape? There were no adequate words for the attack on the homemaker, mother, and wife. Truth be told, Tom and Sara never really talked about anything beyond trivial matters—daily activities and books. Words had not come to them to address the anguish and sense of violation. Silence was its own punishment, and it continued to force more pain on the broken Hardin family like some kind of cosmic millstone crushing them into powder, grinding each of them into the dirt.

CHAPTER SEVEN

    While Sara slept, Tom stood in the kitchen cutting onions. He was cooking, baking potatoes and a pork roast in the oven, picking up the slack in the housework. This was the first time he’d kept house since their marriage. Corrine cooked a little. Nelda helped out. So did Martina and a few others, women from the Methodist church, friends and family in the Zion community. Mostly, folks brought food to the house ready to eat, but they never ventured beyond the front porch.
    Sara slept in the bedroom,